ABSTRACT
Health is a core area where the disparities between the haves and have-nots in global systems become evident, with increasing health inequalities documented across the various sectors of the globe (Kawachi, Kennedy, & Wilkinson, 1999; Kawachi, Wilkinson, & Kennedy, 1999; UNDP, 2004). The comparative differences in the distribution of economic resources go hand in hand with the absence of the basic structural health resources for the poorer communities of the globe. In other words, there is a fundamental economic base underlying the (in)access to health resources amidst poverty. At an absolute level, poorer communities lack the basic capabilities of health that are considered to be minimal to human life. These basic forms of health capacity are constituted in terms of access to health services and treatments, access to information resources, and access to a wide variety of preventive resources (Dutta, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c; Dutta-Bergman, 2004a, 2004b). In this chapter, we examine the intersections of poverty and health, and the ways in which the margins of healthcare are symbolically and materially constructed in dominant discursive spaces of health communication. The overall objective here is to understand the processes of marginalization that create the peripheries of health in contemporary global spaces.
